As I write this post, a few hundred of our industry's best are at Dmexco, which folds right into New York's Advertising Week which - before you know it - turns into CES and SXSW and Cannes and .... You get the picture. But it's not just the big tent-pole gatherings; there are scores of smaller meet and greets peppered throughout the year from the likes of Digiday, ad:tech, iMedia, Digital Storytelling and even Upstream Group's own Seller Forum. In a recent MediaVillage post, the value equation/boondoggle-factor of such events was briefly questioned.
Yet even as "can you believe how many events there are these days?" remains one of the most popular cocktail topics (at these very same events) the market value of human gathering is beyond question. Simple economics tells us so. If sponsors and attendees weren't willingly ponying up the cash, many events would simply wither and die off. Yet here they are - again - blooming like dandelions. I've got a theory about why.
The popularity of human focused events has grown in direct inverse proportion to the decline in day-to-day human contact between people who buy and sell stuff. In other words, the more that "connecting technology" - email, voicemail, texting, hangouts, shared documents - keeps us physically apart, the more we crave the handshake, the few minutes of eye contact, the nod of the head. Bitch all you want about whether a given event was "worth it" or not, human contact is at a premium and we will continue to pay that premium.
Now...to get your money's worth out of any given event...
1. Have a plan. You'd be surprised how many people and companies don't. Who do you aim to meet? How will you structure your time? Can you secure a formal or informal meeting spot? If you just show up, you're just part of the crowd. 2. The first shall be first. As you attend parties or panels, get there first. Hosts and panelists remember the early arrivals. Then leave a little early to get a jump on the next one. No one will miss you at that point. 3. Spread out. People from the same company often stick together at conferences like 7th graders at the first middle school dance. If there are two of you in every conversation, one of you is irrelevant. 4. Write shit down. Give out a hundred business cards and collect two hundred. After each exchange, scribble a note on the back of a card. If someone doesn't have a card, ask to take picture of their name badge with your phone, then text a copy of the photo to yourself with a short note. No matter how important the conversation or the customer, the connections are ephemeral unless you make sure they're not. 5. Marketing, meet Sales! So often marketing and sales live in silos. Marketing buys a sponsorship and a bunch of passes to an event and then doesn't get confirmation from sales about who's attending until a few days before. Wasted dollars, wasted opportunity.
Human-to-Human matters more than ever. Make it count.
